4 ms·

I like how you're unable to imagine it being windy when it rains or transmitting between places that don't rain at the same time, but imagining transmission fro

I like how you're unable to imagine it being windy when it rains or transmitting between places that don't rain at the same time, but imagining transmission from two states over when there's a correlated outage in the local nuclear generation (which happens just as often) is fine. If we did live in this fiction where long term storage is impossible rather than simply not being the lowest hanging fruit I'd also far rather spend 5% of the next century building out renewables and then 5% of the time running fossil fuels when the alternative is: Spend 30% of the next century building reactors whilst running fossil fuels, then 30% of the next century realising the uranium ran out immediately and we have to spend another 30 years building breeders and then finally realising that nuclear needs storage and load shifting too because correlated outages aren't that rare and there's not much demand for energy at 3am.

robertlagrant 4y ago
> which happens just as often What happens just as often? Two nuclear power plants going offline vs it being rainy and not also windy?
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  In the Nordics, in December we had the 3 largest reactors out of 11 out of commission combined with a cold spell. That was a nicely expensive week.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Nuclear stans assure us the road to success involves standardized reactor designs. Now imagine what happens when a terrible design flaw is discovered in that reactor type and all must be shut down to fix it.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Are you saying that will cause as many power delivery lulls as will happen with lack of wind in wind power or lack of sun in solar? That is the context of this.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      The forced outage rate of nuclear is between 1% and 20% depending on how the program is run (abandoning plants that are having problems vs. Maintaining the whole fleet) and last weeks. The scheduled outage rate is 15%. Your backup has to be able to cover several months. Spending an equal amount on VRE, transmission and storage gives you a much lower shortfall per dollar for a given power target than spending the same money on nuclear. Shortfalls over 1 week are incredibly rare. The curtailed energy also decarbonizes many other things like iron reduction and ammonia production.

robertlagrant 4y ago

> which happens just as often What happens just as often? Two nuclear power plants going offline vs it being rainy and not also windy?

Gwypaas 4y ago
In the Nordics, in December we had the 3 largest reactors out of 11 out of commission combined with a cold spell. That was a nicely expensive week.
pfdietz 4y ago
Nuclear stans assure us the road to success involves standardized reactor designs. Now imagine what happens when a terrible design flaw is discovered in that reactor type and all must be shut down to fix it.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Are you saying that will cause as many power delivery lulls as will happen with lack of wind in wind power or lack of sun in solar? That is the context of this.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    The forced outage rate of nuclear is between 1% and 20% depending on how the program is run (abandoning plants that are having problems vs. Maintaining the whole fleet) and last weeks. The scheduled outage rate is 15%. Your backup has to be able to cover several months. Spending an equal amount on VRE, transmission and storage gives you a much lower shortfall per dollar for a given power target than spending the same money on nuclear. Shortfalls over 1 week are incredibly rare. The curtailed energy also decarbonizes many other things like iron reduction and ammonia production.